Slipping into emeritus status this fall after 35 years on the Penn
Law faculty, Robert Gorman, The Kenneth W. Gemmill Professor of Law, will
be free to laze about and revise his two casebooks; finish up the second
edition of his labor law text; teach a course in copyright law; read up
on history, biography, music, science and fiction; take courses in literature
and history at the College; travel; do a bit of international labor arbitration;
take piano lessons for a couple hours a day; read the New York Times cover
to cover; and spend more time with his wife, Caryl, a sixth-grade
public school teacher, who plans to join him soon in his retired ease.

Though none would deny Gorman the rewards of a well-earned rest, the
news of his retirement has prompted accolades and remembrances from 30-plus
years of former students who are now established as legal experts in their
own right. “Bob’s passion for labor law was one of the driving forces
behind my becoming a labor lawyer. His passion for people remains
a benchmark for which I continue to strive,” says Jonathan A. Segal C’82,
L’85, a partner at Wolf Block Schorr & Solis-Cohen.

As a Harvard undergrad (A.B. 1958, summa cum laude), Gorman started
out a math major. By the time he concluded it was not really his dish,
he had “stumbled into a course on American constitutional law.” He shifted
to a major in government, taking tutorials with Robert McCloskey, “my patron
saint and academic mentor.” A Fulbright Scholarship led him to a year at
University College, Oxford, where he studied legal philosophy — “having
been trained in neither law nor philosophy” — under H.L.A. Hart, the subject’s
major 20th century figure. When Gorman elected to return to the U.S. to
join his future wife, Caryl, Hart advised him to apply to law schools rather
than extend graduate study. Gorman took his J.D. from Harvard Law in 1962,
magna cum laude.

Following a clerkship with Irving Kaufman on the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Second Circuit, he was unsure if his future lay in teaching or
practice but opted for what turned out to be a short stint with the Proskauer
Rose firm in New York. Penn Law had approached him during his clerkship
and continued to woo him at Proskauer. In addition, James Freedman, a fellow
clerk at the Second Circuit (and later Penn Law dean), told Gorman he
planned to join the School faculty, and Clark Byse, Gorman’s favorite
teacher at Harvard Law and a former long-time Penn Law faculty member,
nudged him in that direction. “I began at Penn in January of 1965,” recalls
Gorman. “I have never regretted for an instant leaving practice.”

Labor law became his primary specialty through a similar combination
of coincidence and “the wisdom of having no sharply fixed goals too early
in life.” At Proskauer, he spent much of his time on labor cases. When
he joined the faculty, Alexander Hamilton Frey, senior instructor in labor
law, had recently retired, and Gorman was tapped to fill the gap. Then,
while a visiting professor at Harvard Law in 1973-74, revered labor-law
professor Archibald Cox — who had been on leave as Watergate special prosecutor
only to fall victim to President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre — returned
with a new interest: constitutional law. He asked Gorman to take over the
labor law casebook that he edited with Derek Bok, who had moved on to president
of Harvard.

Gorman’s Basic Text on Labor Law: Unionization, and Collective Bargaining
(1976) is the standard in its field: “People tell me that all of the lawyers
in their firm’s labor law department have this book on their desk.” He
has also edited two casebooks — Cases and Materials on Labor Law (with
Cox, Bok & Finkin, 1996) and Copyright: Cases and Materials (with Jane
Ginsburg, 1999).